You are the project manager in charge of developing the latest release of your s

Question

You are the project manager in charge of developing the latest release of your software firm’s flagship product. The product release date is just two weeks away, and enthusiasm for the product is extremely high among your customers. Stock market analysts are fore- casting sales of more than $25 million per month. If so, earnings per share will increase by nearly 50 percent. There is just one problem: two key features promised to customers in this release have several bugs that would severely limit the software’s usefulness. You estimate that at least six weeks are needed to find and fix the problems. In addition, even more time is required to find and fix 15 additional, less severe bugs just uncovered by the QA team. What would you recommend to management?

Explanation / Answer

>First of all a project manager must take responsibility for leading the project effort   towards the stated and agreed upon goals and objectives of the project. He or she must also have a very clear idea of what constitutes the successful conclusion of the project and work towards that end.

Call your client and explain. Take a minute to get in touch with your client and let them know that you’ve overbooked yourself. Explain to them that you want to do the best work you possibly can for them and, in order to do that, you would like to renegotiate deadlines and timing for the project. They’ll appreciate the honesty

Renegotiate terms of the contract. If you wrote your contract the right way, you should have the option to renegotiate the terms at any point in your relationship with your client. Be honest and ask for a renegotiation on the project so you can work out the timing more effectively

>Do not ask for more time, expose the options.

As there's a possibility that the original plan won't be met, you need to expose the options and let the client do the call. Depending on the project, the client may not be interested to extend the schedule.

> By Refreshing client's mind.

Project estimates are never 100% accurate... that's why they're estimations. If the delay was caused by one of the reported risks, you might have more comfort raising it.

>Always be transparent:

There might be a temptation on avoiding report today as the problem may solve itself magically before the deadline.

>>The ideal way is by having a separate team of escalation engineers whose jobs it is to resolve those kinds of issues - many teams like to rotate engineers in and out of these teams to ensure a broad base of knowledge as well as to avoid the feeling that they're not contributing to the product, "just" fighting fires.

>Analyze, Prioritize, Decide.
>Swap with other contents inside Sprint.
>Prioritize altogether with other contents of the Sprint, would the Product Owner willing to deliver the planned contents first or the fixed bug first?

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